Word: nair
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...With a $23 million budget and cast that includes Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne, Nair's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair is her biggest film yet. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, the 1820s London social climber who set the bar by which such mountaineers would forever after be measured. The buzz is all about how Nair has played up Thackeray's Indian influences?he was born in Calcutta?including a Bollywood dance number and an ending shot in the Rajasthani fort town of Jodhpur. The New York Times griped about the "outlandish" sight of Witherspoon doing...
...Indeed, throughout her career, there's been criticism that Nair, despite her gift for lush and stylish spectacles, crams too much onto the screen and tends to lack depth. She claims not to care: "My feeling is that I do what I do, then I offer it to the world. I hope people will be affected by it, watch it and are impressed. I aim to put bums on seats. But that's not to say that I'm confident or unconfident. I don't think about the fruits of my actions. I just do the work...
...tempting to trace this never-look-back attitude to Nair's childhood. She was born into a middle-class civil servant's family in Bhubaneswar, a dirt-poor city in eastern India that is usually given a wide berth by tourists. "Even in Indian terms, it's really remote," she says. Nair was also, she claims, an unwanted child?or, as she puts it, a "contraceptual blunder." In 1957 the Indian government was worried about its exploding population, and her father, a senior bureaucrat, had sworn to limit the family to the two sons they already had. He sent...
...Nair proved to be an unusually precocious child?top of her class and a leader to her elder brothers. Then came her first experience of theater, in festival dramatizations of mythic Hindu tales. The performances "possessed my mind," she recalls, and also provided a means of escape, allowing her to act in plays in New Delhi. By 18, studying and performing at university in the Indian capital, Nair was applying to every U.S. college she could think of, already displaying the resolve and energy that would mark her life. Mamdani describes film as Nair's ideal medium. "Mira often says...
...Nair claims to be mellowing. "I find I am less restless now," she says. For two years, she has started each day on set with a yoga session. But for true calm, it has to be the garden. "To think I would ever get excited about watching something grow," she says. "It teaches you about rhythm and patience." Despite such claims, she still likes to introduce herself with the line "I'm Mira Nair. Rhymes with fire." And her schedule for 2005 suggests she's far from ready to cool down. She's working on adaptations of The Impressionist...